Go Get Em Dave

Dave Winer points out that Facebook sucks. His reason, and I totally agree, is that Facebook, among other things, doesn’t give us easy access to our Address Book. It doesn’t give us a copy. It doesn’t let us manipulate or change it. It’s our data, that we’ve collected, and we can’t have access to it our way.

I’m someone who uses Facebook to reach people, to build relationships in another dimension than standard email, but it really does piss me off that I can’t organize my data my way. Sound like why we have things like RSS? It is. So we can take our data, put it where we want it, and use it in different ways. No wonder Dave doesn’t like how Facebook treats its user data. He’s a pioneer and evangelist for RSS.

With the growing complexity of social media and social networks, and with a strong need to be able to cut through the clutter, organize things my own way, and make MEANINGFUL correlation of information from my various networks, I applaud Dave for pointing out this annoyance.

Facebook does what it does, and there are tons of people using it, but that doesn’t mean it’s working just right yet.